This is the fan-made / managed forum, for sharing community made content (avatars / props)
The site owned / managed by the creators is https://facerig.com (currently down, we are working on it)
The Steam forums are on http://steamcommunity.com/app/274920/discussions/

Some matters, particularly regarding animation and rigging, are still prone to change before Beta, but here's how things are now:
For sure we will not be using morph targets/blend shapes, in the first version of the avatar files.
To build our avatars we are using high res sculpts, to get proper normal maps, and then we do the real time (low res) version, retopo-ed from the high res sculpts .
All the expressions are built using classic bone driven animations (with a high number of bones in the face) and up to four influences per vertex.
Blendshapes will probably be supported in a future version of the avatar files, right now we start with classic skinned meshes, and a large number of bones to provide the needed degree of deformation control.

In regard to shaders/materials:
typically we have up to 9 distinct shaders on avatars
- geometry strip hair shader (with anisotropic specular)
- fur shader , with physics/intertia (must be uniquely mapped, with no major stretching because of texture-space shading calculations)
- fur shader, without physics/intertia (must be uniquely mapped, with no major stretching because of texture-space shading calculations)
- human skin (with subsurface scattering simulation) (must be uniquely mapped, with no major stretching because of texture-space shading calculations)
- eye ball shader ( that supports pupil dilation and refraction/reflection- with some simulated occlusion)
- special material used for eyelid diffuse shadows on the eyeball.
- inside of the mouth shader (must be uniquely mapped, with no major stretching because of texture-space shading calculations)
- cloth and metal shader
- eyelashes/whiskers shader

In regard to bone count:
we have avatars ranging from 70 to 120 bones.

In regard to triangle count:
we have avatars ranging from 22 000 to 80 000 triangles on the base mesh (though bear in mind that the fur shader can multiply up to 32 times the triangles from the furred areas).

In regard to texture maps :
we are using multiple texture maps for each shader, typically the following:
- diffuse map
- specular map (with custom signification for each of the RGBA channels)
- normal map (up to 4 distinct normal maps for meshes with animated normals)
- Ambient occlusion map (up to 4 AO's for meshes with animated normals, packed in the 4 channels of the same texture )
- other material properties map ( dependent on materials )
Fine tuning of the texture maps will have to be done with a running FaceRig build, because the default Maya/Max viewport render does not support the the rendering features that we use, and overall different lighting equations are used, so it is best to fine tune them while using a running copy of FaceRig.

In regard To Rigging and Animation:
There will be two kinds of specifications regarding the rigging and animation, one for enthusiasts and one for professional character makers.

As for the enthusiasts, they will have to comply with a very strict pipeline and as long as they stick to that they should get the expected avatar results very easy. They will have a template for bone structure and fewer animations to make, as the program will make the proper exports of the animation atomics and modifications in order to make it work. And these automatized interventions will be made possible by using strict naming conventions.

For the pros, there are significantly less restrictions regarding naming conventions and bone hierarchies but they will have to extra careful while making and preparing the animations in order to work properly within the system. They will have much more liberty deciding how the rig is structured and what bones are driving the expression animations but since they probably make a very custom avatar they will have to tell the system how to use it. They will do that by exporting the animations in certain ways and in some cases editing a configuration file ( defining which animations are base animations, and which are additive animations and other gritty details )